Integrating with shadowtext::geom_shadowtext or similar functionality?

[rossdrucker]

Might end up as more of a feature request here, but is there a way to add a shadow/outline to the text?

[wilkox]

There's not an easy way to do this currently. Is the contrast argument to geom_fit_text() of any help for your use case?

[rossdrucker]

Unfortunately I don't believe it's useful in my case. I'm looking to mimic the functionality of shadowtext::geom_shadowtext to outline the characters in the text, not necessarily just contrast against the background if I'm understanding how the contrast argument works properly.

[wilkox]

I've had a go at implementing this, but run up against two problems:

1. The shadows make it quite a bit harder to accurately compute the height and width of the text.
2. The easiest approach requires adding shadowtext::shadowtextGrob as a third option alongside gridtext::richtext_grob and plain old grid::textGrob for drawing text. I'm already unhappy with the overhead of having two different grobs for drawing text. Ultimately I'm going to need to write my own textGrob replacement with features for rich text, text in polar coordinates, and shadow text, but this will be a big job.

Thanks for the suggestion though and I've marked it as a feature request.